James Fallows

The Senate Judiciary Committee has approved a hugely controversial ban on assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition clips, but the measure faces nearly certain defeat on the Senate floor....

The Senate now faces a floor fight in coming weeks over Democrats' push to dramatically alter U.S. gun laws for the first time in two decades. While the Feinstein assault weapons ban is unlikely to overcome GOP opposition and get a vote -- as well as concerns from red state Democrats up for reelection in 2014 -- Democrats and the White House will continue their drive to enact universal background checks on all gun sales.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a member of the Judiciary Committee, acknowledged that the assault weapons ban will have a hard time overcoming opposition. "It's pretty clear the other side is locked in opposition [to assault weapons ban.] -- [I] don't see us getting 60 votes," Whitehouse said, referring to the necessary bar to pass the Senate.

• It takes 51 votes to "pass the Senate."
• It takes 60 votes to break a filibuster.
• Through the past six-plus years, the GOP minority-power strategy in the Senate has deliberately aimed to make the filibuster, historically a rarity, seem routine and acceptable. Every news account that presents the super-majority 60-vote threshold as the "necessary bar" for Senate passage, and a majority of 55 votes as "certain defeat," ratifies this strategy. Especially in an "informed" insider political-specialist publication.
  

It wouldn't take any extra space to make things clear. The first highlighted passage could say "nearly certain filibuster" rather than "nearly certain defeat." The last passage could say "necessary bar to break a filibuster" rather than "necessary bar to pass the Senate." To look on the bright side, the middle highlighted reference is exactly right: the strategy is designed to keep the proposal from ever coming to a vote. (Thanks to AS for the lead.)

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.

Let's see if we can make a better case for Iraq. I was a "liberal hawk," and I think I still am. In part I guess I was encouraged by the silence, or ecouragement, of the ex- Clintonites, and nobody beat the drum harder than the New Republic. [JF note: unless it was the WaPo's editorial page.]

But the reason I supported the war, and still suspect it was the least bad choice, isn't one you've addressed and it's one I find opponents tend to evade. I mean, sure, get rid of a bad guy, yes, maybe WMD, whatever. But the reason I thought we should go to war in 2003 is that the status quo ante really, really sucked.

I had been in the Arab world in the '90s and seen constant angry footage of people starving in a crumbling Iraq, held in that state by the U.S. military (I read figures of civilian lives lost, which are horrific -- and remember the UNICEF figure of 6,000 children under age 5 dying each month due to sanctions before the war). The large US military forces in Saudi Arabia protecting the Kurds, Basra and Kuwait infuriated folks -- remember it was bin Laden's big bitch -- and it ended soon after we went into Iraq. We had -- I think unwisely, but nonetheless -- effectively created client states in the North and South of Iraq dependent on US protection, and nobody has tried to make the case that there was any way to return Iraq to the Ba'athists without ugly consequences for those groups. And I've had the opportunity to speak with the airmen who flew the missions in support of that protection while under Iraqi anti-aircraft fire, and over a decade of that really dangerous work took a toll on them and their families. So I think the "let's not go to war" case might've been superior -- but let's not kid ourselves that it wasn't ugly, too.

In the early 2000s, the Bushies I think made the best of all possible options in pushing so-called "smart sanctions," saying, look, we're stuck in this mess for the long haul so let's invest the manpower to try real real hard to keep certain things out of the regime's hands, and get as much food and medicine into Iraq as we can. And I think they did the diplomacy OK -- at least, before the thing went up for a vote in summer 2001, other countries were making the right noises about it. There had just been an awfully contentious election, folks at least where I was were _mad_ and I heard a lot of crap about Bush trying to push this thing through the UN because of his pathological hatred of the Iraqis -- but it was crap. "Smart sanctions" was a good idea, actually. And it died an ugly death at the UN, so your choices at that point were, somehow unseat the regime, or continue with the sanctions regime as it was.

There are an awful lot of hard counterfactuals here. Who knew the Bushies would throw away a decade of expertise and interest in Iraq? And I have never understood why we needed to shepherd in a hand-picked government or even occupy the place -- I couldn't give a crap who rules Iraq so long as they know that if they mess with the populations in the North and South under U.S. protection they're going to get smashed -- but the war went the way it did and it was ugly, and we learned a lot of things about military accountability that, well, we're probably better off for having learned but it wasn't good. Certainly I didn't appreciate the importance of international "legitimacy" and alliance-building. But still I wish folks who opposed the war would have to append "I was for the continuation of the sanctions regime and basing forces in Saudi Arabia" (or else, "I was for the lifting of sanctions, and let what happens to the Kurds and Shi'a, happen") -- because it's a useful reminder that there wasn't a great path out of that hole. Some stuff's just really hard.

The whole democracy thing fatigues me. Since Nebuchadnezzar, every regime that has set out to attack another regime has done so with multiple public justifications (yes, even the most totalitarian). In the age of mass media, the justifications have become more elaborate, but all of the rationales boil down to three basic themes: (1) they were going to attack us first (aka the Texas manslaughter defense: "I was just protecting myself in advance"); (2); that other regime is really awful; and (3) the people groaning under the rule of that regime will be much better off once we invade and depose the regime. The Bush administration employed slightly different rationales for whichever audience it was trying to convince, but its main themes fit the historical template. All the bloviating about exporting democracy to the Middle East drew mainly from rationales (2) and (3).
 
What struck me at the time of the Iraq invasion was that the neoconservatives and their fellow travelers, mainly Republican but also some Democrats, frequently displayed the most touching devotion (in public) to bringing democracy to the suffering peoples of the Middle East while evincing a high degree of cynicism (mainly in private) about how "Arabs only understand force." In some cases it wasn't even concealed, as Thomas Friedman demonstrated:

"What they [meaning Iraqis] needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um, and basically saying, "Which  part of this sentence don't you understand?" You don't think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we're just gonna let it grow? Well, Suck. On. This. . . . We could have hit Saudi Arabia. It was part of that bubble. Could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could. That's the real truth." (Charlie Rose, 30 May 2003) 

It's not yet clear how much funding the National Labs will lose, but it will total tens of millions of dollars. Interrupting -- or worse, halting -- basic research in the physical, biological, and computational sciences would be devastating, both for science and for the many U.S. industries that rely on our national laboratory system to power their research and development efforts.

Instead, this drop in funding will force us to cancel all new programs and research initiatives, probably for at least two years. This sudden halt on new starts will freeze American science in place while the rest of the word races forward, and it will knock a generation of young scientists off their stride, ultimately costing billions in missed future opportunities.

When I was a kid, in the 1970s, there were about 2000 'operational' weather balloon sites that released balloons synchronized to be in the middle of the troposphere at 00 and 12 UTZ daily.

When I did a survey of how many there were in 2000, there were about 800. There are myriad reasons, the relative poverty of many countries that can't afford to pay for the programs and geopolitics among them.

The number is about to drop precipitously due to a contrived crisis by a rich nation.

I am deeply ashamed for my country.

TSA ... might not be willing to admit it, but they seem to have come to terms with two simple truths.

The first is that a potentially deadly sharp object -- a knife, if you will -- can be improvised from virtually anything, including no shortage of materials found on airplanes. Even a child knows this.... 

The second truth is that, from a terrorist's standpoint, the September 11th blueprint is no longer a useful strategy.... 

Conventional wisdom holds that the attacks succeeded because 19 hijackers took advantage of a weakness in airport security by smuggling boxcutters onto jetliners. And conventional wisdom is wrong.

What the men actually took advantage of was a weakness in our thinking, and our presumptions of what a hijacking was, and how one would be expected to unfold, based on the decades-long track record of hijackings.

"Now is not the time for reduced vigilance," he said in a statement, "or to place additional burdens on TSA agents who should be looking for dangerous items, not wasting time measuring the length of a knife blade."

"In the confined environment of an airplane, even a small blade in the hands of a terrorist can lead to disaster."

We need to get past the emotionally charged style of security-think that ultimately makes us less safe. These new measures are sensible, and meanwhile TSA can, or should, concentrate or more potent threats to safety -- your safety as well as mine -- such as bombs and explosives.

Ten years later, it's clear that the Iraq war cast "a very large shadow" indeed, but it was a much darker shadow than the fantasists who ran American foreign policy back then foresaw. Bush believed that freedom was humanity's natural state: Blow away the manhole-cover that a tyrant pressed down on his people, and freedom would gush forth like a geyser. Yet when Saddam Hussein was toppled, the main thing liberated was the blood hatred that decades of dictatorship had suppressed beneath the surface.

If you would like to eliminate uncertainty about the origins of this view, I direct your attention to a signed contribution from the editor of the Post's editorial page, Fred Hiatt, on why "Obama could get things done by governing today." Please read this and see if your reaction is other than ... wow.



Yes (the essay itself says), the Republicans are wrong in their extremism, and in their refusal to consider any increase in taxes, and in their willingness to filibuster anything. And, yes, the president has been offering compromises, in atmospherics and in substance. But still all sides are necessarily to blame for a partisan stand-off. And the president could solve this mess if he decided to "govern." The payoff of the column, in the form of an open-letter appeal to the president:

And beyond politics, on many of the biggest challenges you're going to need ideas from Column A and Column B... [Y]ou can't solve the debt challenge without raising more revenue and controlling entitlement costs... Eventually, in other words, you're going to have to wheel and deal and compromise -- you're going to have to govern. It might as well be now.

• Does he propose a budget plan modeled on ideas from revered centrists like Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, or Robert Rubin? Oh, wait, he's already done that.
• Does he propose dealing with entitlement reforms? Oh, wait, that was in the State of the Union address.

Imagine that Mitt Romney had decisively defeated Obama in the 2012 election on a platform of tax cuts for the rich and deep cuts to government as the only way to reduce the deficit, dramatically repudiating the President's call for higher taxes on the wealthy, continued implementation of the biggest expansion of the safety net in 60 years, and more government spending to boost the economy.

Then imagine that Democrats in the Senate (the only part of government they controlled) responded to this by proposing to dramatically expand health care and stimulus spending and pay down the deficit only with 100 percent tax hikes -- and not a single penny more in spending cuts -- and on top of that, then suggested President Romney has failed to sincerely try to find common ground with them.

As an academic in the Earth Sciences, I would argue that threat deflation is rampant (but not in national security issues). Looking at where threat-deflation is common, and where threat-inflation is common, helps us to understand where either occurs. 

If you look at many threats to society, for example anthropogenic climate change or cigarette smoking, there are or were large campaigns to downplay either the impact or existence of these threats.  They are funded by organizations with a clear interest in the matter -- coal companies and tobacco companies in these examples. It takes energy, time and money to inflate or deflate a threat.

Peculiar to national security issues is that there usually no clear organized group that benefit from deflating the threat -- some general will make his career being the first leader of the new Cyber Command.  Is there anyone who can make a career saying it is not necessary?  Will any politician be celebrated for stopping some effort to "make us safer" in anywhere near the same proportion that he or she would be vilified when something bad happens? Are there any consultants who will earn large fees telling us something is not worth worrying about?  Why would we pay someone to deal with non-threats?

Threat inflation may be bad for everyone, but it is good for someone -- a tragedy of the commons, if you will, where the commons is our pool of resources to either deal with threats or to invest in society. 

I am a graduate student studying the proliferation of nuclear technology (especially centrifuges for uranium enrichment) in the Engineering School at [distinguished East Coast university.]  [He goes on to name advisors with extensive experience in assessing weapons threats from the Middle East and elsewhere, and with reputations for skepticism about some claimed threats.] In this email, I speak only for myself.

Regrettably, I've found, this field of study is replete with slanderous rhetoric and name-calling on both sides of the spectrum, a good portion of  which is propelled by the colossal egos of a few with especially influential voices.  Mostly because I am loath to participate in such unpleasantries, I will keep my comments as brief and benign as possible.

For the record: I believe that military action in Iran is completely unwarranted at this point and will remain so for (at very least) the near future.

While I am thankful for the growing body of scientific experts willing to speak out and counterbalance our nation's penchant for "threat inflation,"  I worry that a number of anti-war scientist/activists are guilty of the same fundamental offense as their Bush-era nemeses: allowing their political agendas to shape their technical assessments.  Technical experts who maintain an a priori commitment to nonintervention can frequently do more harm than good.  By softening the facts, downplaying suspicious activity, and gratuitously applying the "alarmist" label to any and all who oppose them, these analysts weaken the public discourse and undermine the ability of the IAEA to insist on transparency from nations like Iran.

In a recent post, you link to two op-eds by Yousaf Butt.  (I feel obliged to stress that both are op-eds and quite likely do not reflect the position of many or most Bulletin scientists.)  Like many of my colleagues, I cringe when the Washington Post, for example, levels sweeping allegations at Iran based on a tiny amount of new (even if credible) information.  So, I applaud Butt in one sense.  Unfortunately, though, based on my own reading of the evidence, I cannot agree that he has "debunked" much of anything:

1. No loudspeaker magnet, barring a truly remarkable coincidence, would require the exact dimensions of the magnets in Iran's centrifuges, down to the nearest one-thousandth of a centimeter in two of the three specifications and to the nearest millimeter in the third.

2. While the diagram he attacks in his second piece is by no means a smoking gun, the reasoning that leads him to call it  " either slipshot analysis or an amateurish hoax," was later shown to be a mixup in units -- he simply didn't have sufficient information.

While I worry often about nuclear matters and "threat inflation," and while I am critical of the current trend that sensationalizes every alleged example of Iranian deception, I do believe in this statement, taken from a recent rebuttal to Butt: "the public needs to know the facts about Iran's nuclear program, even when uncomfortable, in order to design a responsible reaction to Iran that avoids war."

Faced with mounting evidence that my films were born of a time and circumstances that had passed, I resolved that Brett and Melanie: Boi Meets Girl would be the last film, and that it was time to move on to something else.

So what did I decide to do?

I decided to start a sustainable energy eco-tourism project in the community where I live. This project has a educational component for local school children which I hope we'll be able to provide at little or no cost. That's my attempt to skip as much of that "flinty middle stage" of life as possible and get on with the giving back part of my life while my heart still beats strong and true.

"If a person's going to make a stand on a nomination, this is the way to do it--the way Sen. Paul is doing it," [Oregon senator Jeff] Merkley said. "The American people can watch this and weigh in on whether he's a hero or a bum. That's reasonable. That honors the traditions of the Senate."

Merkley contrasted that with the filibuster that happened right before Paul's speech, one that got perfunctory media attention. For the third time, Democrats tried to advance the nomination of Caitlin Halligan to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. For the third time she got a majority of "aye" votes but couldn't break the 60-vote cloture threshold.

"That took no time or energy from any member," Merkley said. "It had no impact on the American people. It had no accountability. From the time that leadership struck its deal on the filibuster, they talked about the need for comity. And what we've seen since then is a 100 percent, all-out effort to paralyze this body.

Per your observations on G. W. Bush's decisiveness, I wonder if you have ever noted an interesting contradiction in the Bush administration's record.

No American President, with the possible exceptions of those who faced civil (Lincoln) or global (Franklin Roosevelt) war, ever made claims for Presidential authority and prerogatives as sweeping as the last President Bush did.  Yet in practice, Bush yielded more Presidential authority to selected subordinates than any President since Wilson had his stroke.

The war on terrorism was effectively run by Vice President Cheney after 9/11.  Both Bush's Secretaries of Defense were left all but unsupervised with respect to war policy -- apart from the Bremer period in Iraq, when Bush gave the former ambassador a free hand to make decisions no one else wanted to make.  Perhaps most striking of all was Bush's unqualified delegation of executive power to his Treasury Secretary at the end of his tenure.  We might with justice refer to most of 2008 as the time of the Paulson administration.

For all the airs he put on as "The Decider," Bush was in many respects an extraordinarily weak President.  The ignorance and intellectual laziness you spoke of often drove his decisiveness toward finding someone else to make decisions.

The only example of threat deflation I can think of was George W. Bush pre-9/11.

I have all sorts of thoughts about the 10th anniversary of the Iraq invasion, for another time.  I'm probably not the first reader of yours, though, to note that you set the bar for honorable conduct pretty low with your reference yesterday to former President Bush.

Bush was the one person most responsible for the disaster Iraq became; he has never either apologized or accepted responsibility for his mistakes, and has devoted the years since he left office to presiding over his ghostwritten insta-memoirs and giving lavishly compensated speeches to closed audiences.  If you think Bush deserves credit for not criticizing how President Obama has tried to repair the damage Bush caused, you have a more charitable soul than I do.

• Ignorance was his low level of pre-existing knowledge of the complexities of the world.
• "Incuriosity" was his apparent lack of passion about learning what he didn't know.
• Decisiveness was his desire, nonetheless, to make big, sweeping choices quickly -- for instance, ten years ago that it made sense to invade Iraq.

You forgot Robert Byrd:

Before: "If the United States leads the charge to war in the Persian Gulf, we may get lucky and achieve a rapid victory. But then we will face a second war: a war to win the peace in Iraq. This war will last many years and will surely cost hundreds of billions of dollars. In light of this enormous task, it would be a great mistake to expect that this will be a replay of the 1991 war. The stakes are much higher in this conflict."

During: Today I weep for my country. I have watched the events of recent months with a heavy, heavy heart. No more is the image of America one of strong, yet benevolent peacekeeper. The image of America has changed. Around the globe, our friends mistrust us, our word is disputed, our intentions are questioned. Instead of reasoning with those with whom we disagree, we demand obedience or threaten recrimination. (March 19, 2003)

After: Of the more than 18,000 votes he cast as a senator, Byrd said he was proudest of his vote against the Iraq war resolution.  (June 12, 2006)

I was struck, though, by this quotation from your "liberal hawk" and "avowed leftist":

I think just the assassination attempt on Bush 41 is plenty all by itself--what kind of country are we if we let another country's leader pull something like that with impunity?

One trouble with this is that the assassination attempt on Bush 41 was always dubious and has been pretty thoroughly discredited by now.  Another is that the US has attempted, sometimes successfully, to assassinate leaders of other countries -- notably Castro, whom the US tried to assassinate many times.  Would [this hawk] agree, I wonder, that Cuba would be justified in invading the US in retaliation?  If not, kind of country is Cuba if it lets another country's leader pull something like that with impunity?  Obviously that is a rhetorical question, whose answer is "a small, weak, and thoroughly menaced country that knows it couldn't bring the invasion off."  But morally, by this standard, a Cuban invasion of the US would be completely justified....

Which reminds me: Obama's opposition to the war, mentioned by your reader CJ, is highly disputable. I was always criticial, myself, of the whole 'quagmire' argument directed by many American liberals against the Iraq war: it'll cost (us) too much, it'll last too long, it'll cost too many (American) lives.  Imagine a Soviet politician who'd argued against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on those grounds; or a Japanese who'd argued against the attack on Pearl Harbor, or against Japan's imperial conquests in Asia, on the grounds that it would last too long and cost too much, and Japan would become stuck in a quagmire.  What American would hail such people for their great wisdom and insight into world affairs?  Usually we condemn the USSR and Japan for their aggression against other countries, but only "hippies" would condemn the US for aggression.

In the run-up to both Iraq wars I knew some opponents and protesters who argued that, contrary to the promises of our leaders, these wars would not be cakewalks and would last longer and be bloodier and more expensive than we were being told.  I told them that I hoped they were wrong, because they were effectively hoping for a long, bloody, costly war.  I preferred that as few people died or were hurt as possible, and that there were other better reasons to oppose those wars.  When they thought about it, they tended to agree with me.

I was puzzled at the time, and remain puzzled, by the fact that people who accepted the basically humanitarian argument for war (Saddam is dreadful, and the Iraqis would be better off if we deposed him) did not think: if we depose Saddam for these reasons, a lot depends on how we handle the aftermath. Luckily, we do not have to speculate about this: we already have an aftermath carried out by the Bush administration ready to hand, in Afghanistan. How's that going?

It wasn't as clear then as it is now how badly Bush and Cheney blew that one, but it was clear enough for me to think, at the time: the people in the Bush administration are not interested in any sort of serious investment in making the countries they invade better, more governable, whatever. Rumsfeld will try to prove his theories about how you can do everything with next to no footprint, Bush and Cheney will go haring off after the next big thing, etc. So if someone thought that invading Iraq would be justified IF we were willing to undertake some sort of serious effort to make Iraq a better place, then she ought also to think: what are the odds of that? and then: given the available evidence, not that good.

I did not accept the humanitarian justification for invasion myself. (Not that I doubted Saddam's awfulness -- I was on the Turkish side of their border with Iraq during one of the last bits of the Anfal campaign -- but I didn't think that necessarily meant that invasion would be a good idea.) But I really never understood why the people who did accept it were so apparently uninterested in the evidence of our competence at nation-building provided by our conduct in Afghanistan after the Taliban were defeated.

The [liberal hawk] reader comments that Iraqis are surely better off now than they were under Saddam's power....

First, he, and you and I are really in no place to say what makes Iraqis 'better off'. That is a question for actual Iraqis living in Iraq. But from what we can say as outsiders:  Iraq under Saddam was no paradise, but the infrastructure of the country was completely obliterated during the war, leaving people who previously had electricity, running water, general physical safety and comfort with none of those. Second, a huge number of Iraqis died as a result of the war. Huge. Well over a hundred thousand. We should keep them in mind when making throwaway claims about life being 'better' for Iraqis, when the invasion coalition killed so many of them. I had an Iraqi roommate for a time who had lost so many friends in the war he had lost count.

Basically, I just want to acknowledge that there is no straightforward way to measure whether lives are 'better off' as a result of any traumatic event like a war, and that any discussion of such has to include mention of the unspeakable damage that this war has done to a generation of Iraqis. And any discussion of possible future military adventures for the US should too.